Tag: advertising

More than a year has passed since the New York Times’ newsroom published “Journalism That Stands Apart: The Report of the 2020 Group.” The report was intended to define “the newsroom’s strategies and aspirations” and laid out arguments for initiatives like nurturing more reader participation; creating more visually stimulating, multimedia journalism; and committing to greater collaboration between the newsroom and the publisher’s product teams.

Overall, the report provided interesting insight on what the Times was planning for its future, so we couldn’t help but wonder what other newspapers had on their agenda for 2020. E&P reached out to several newspapers across the country and asked them to share.

What variables do you think will have the most influence on how well your newspaper performs—in both revenue and audience—in the coming two years?

It’s easy to wax nostalgic about newspapers’ heydays, when the selling of ads was as simple as it was to valuate the content, the service, the roles newspapers played in the community. Sales professionals back then need only dangle these carrots to compel an advertiser. It was, indeed, a simpler time.

Things became more dicey as marketing morphed into something far more sophisticated, with buzzwords such as “demographics” and “targeted marketing” representing new lingo, and ad decisions were now inspired by measurements and metrics rather than by the relationships between publisher and advertiser.

Today, technology drives nearly every aspect of the publisher-advertiser-reader relationship, and that’s had some notable influence on not only the kinds of ads that are selling and how they’re being sold, but also on the ad-sales labor market.